How Ashesi University standardized graduate admissions

Ashesi University is one of Africa's most respected private universities. Based in Berekuso, Ghana, it is known for a liberal-arts education built around ethics, leadership, and entrepreneurship, and it draws students from across the continent. Its graduate programs, led by the Ashesi MBA, attract applicants from many countries and undergraduate institutions.

A values-driven university, and no fair way to compare applicants

That diversity is the hard part of admissions. A transcript from one country does not mean the same thing as a transcript from another, degrees and grading scales differ, and an interview rewards the confident applicant more than the capable one. The admissions team had no objective, consistent way to judge the aptitude, English, and critical thinking a graduate program actually demands, so strong applicants were hard to tell apart from well-presented ones.

One assessment every applicant sits

Ashesi's Graduate Admissions team built a standard set of assessments on Testlify and asks every applicant to sit them. Rather than reading documents that do not compare, admissions now sees each candidate answer the same cognitive, English, critical-thinking, analytical, and quantitative-aptitude questions, then compares people on the same objective evidence.

The team assembled that screen from six ready-made Testlify libraries, from Critical Thinking and Analytical Skills to Quantitative Aptitude, Logical Reasoning, and English, so it did not have to write a graduate entrance exam from scratch. Because Ashesi runs on .edu.gh addresses, Testlify's engineering team also adapted onboarding for education-domain sign-ups. What matters to admissions is simpler: one repeatable bar, applied the same way to every applicant.

A repeatable admissions standard, now expanding

The standard holds because applicants actually complete it. Of 122 graduate applicants invited, 110 finished their assessment, a 90% completion rate, and the pool logged roughly 7,900 scored responses. Near-universal follow-through means admissions decisions rest on complete, comparable evidence rather than on who submitted the most polished file.

The clearest proof the approach works is that Ashesi keeps building on it. The university renewed its subscription into another year, and in mid-2026 its admissions team began setting up a new Testlify assessment, a timed multiple-choice section, a written error-spotting exercise, and an essay, to screen applicants for a new graduate Law program. What began as one MBA admissions screen is becoming Ashesi's standard way to evaluate graduate applicants across programs.